In the last few weeks, as we have worked toward our event in San Antonio, I have explained our broad audience to several people. It occurred to me that my clarifications might be interesting to our readers, as well.
To explain this, I need to include some history, first. At SOCAP: the Conference at the Intersection of Money and Meaning, the focus quickly shifted from Money and Meaning to Money first, and then, sometimes, Meaning. SOCAP helped define and continues to help build the world of impact investing. And that’s good work. Something that needs to be done.
But the Meaning part is why many of us do the work of Neighborhood Economics. I often say to my colleagues that this work checks a very large MEANING box for me that isn’t always checked by other work.
Many of you know that I am a Southern Baptist preacher’s daughter. I have three older brothers. When I was growing up, I was aware of the sense that somebody in my family needed to carry on the “family business.” And it was also clear to me in ways I am still coming to understand that in that time and space, the “somebody” who should carry on was not me, the daughter. Indeed, one of my brothers is a Baptist preacher, and another is a Baptist music director.
I’ve been a hospital chaplain and an ordained deacon, but I have not been employed by the church in the way that my brothers have. Just recently, though, when Rosa Lee and I were in Waco, we met with Professor Mike Stroope at Baylor’s Truett Seminary. Mike actually grew up in the church my father pastored when I was born. In a powerful way, as I sat there talking to Mike about bringing together seminarians and church leaders in San Antonio, I felt an amazing sense of peace that I am, in fact, carrying on the family business.
The meaning part, defined specifically for me as the faith part of our work, is deeply important to me. And it is for everyone on our team. I am in this work because I believe that my money is an expression of my faith. I feel strongly that I cannot just throw some change in an offering plate and then ignore economic injustice, specifically the racial wealth gap, all around me and still say that I am trying to follow Jesus.
Because of the paths of everyone on our team, we have built an explicitly faith-friendly event. We are absolutely faith-connected and faith-adjacent. And by faith, let me be clear that while I am sharing from a Christian perspective, our work strives to be deeply interfaith. We believe our primary work is getting people of faith to understand this work so that they will become more deeply engaged. To do that, we also need to train faith leaders, supporting them as they develop a theology of money. The Church needs a theology of money and needs to lean into it if it is to remain relevant. People of faith must give voice to the moral imperative that any good economic structure will consider all people, not just those at the top.
To do this work, we need everyone in the room listening to each other. Theoretically, we could have a conference that would only be people of faith, but so many of the real teachers, the leaders, and innovators come from a wide variety of backgrounds and do this work for a wide variety of reasons.
To us, the moral imperative of doing this work is central. And we need everyone in the room.
We need experts in the room regardless of their faiths. We need their expertise. It is hard for me to imagine that anyone is working on economic justice without some kind of moral hunger for it, some kind of moral compass compelling them to look directly at the injustice and try to change it. But it is not my first concern to find out how they define that moral compass for themselves.
Still, I do believe that the church should be activated in this ecosystem both for its own sake and because the church can be an important institutional force pushing back against other forces, like Wall Street’s unquestioning allegiance to capitalism. We want faith people in the room to speak to the moral hunger that won’t be heard by the finance world without people of faith. We want faith leaders to join us so that they gather the resources to lead their congregations in responding to this moral hunger.
So, in short, our audience is diverse, complex, and joyously so. We are unapologetically faith friendly, and some of us speak of this work as expressions of our faith. But everyone is welcome at Neighborhood Economics, and I genuinely believe that the diversity of thought and worldview is important in this work. It helps us fill our toolbox with stronger tools so that all of us have access to the right tool for the job in so many different contexts.
In other words, our audience is YOU. Join us.